more communities

While my Iron line is making a profit since the last entry, it’s not really carrying that many goods. The bottleneck is the lack of Iron being brought to the Steel Mill. While I could resolve this by just waiting for the Iron Mine I’m using to expand, I have a few other Iron Mines on the map that I could make use of. But before I can connect it up, I’ll need to replace that quick and easy drop off I used for the Steel Mill drop station. (A side note: The names of towns, like Fairypool, are created using the Silly language pack – the default is for more serious names if you don’t like them. Station names are based on nearby towns, but the player can rename them)

The old Steel Mill drop station - totally uninteresting

I’m going to build a fairly standard style of station entrance with 5 platforms I use in my games. It’s probably overkill for this map with such a small amount of industry, but given that I have so much space to build in, I won’t worry too much. It is also what is called a Ro-Ro station, which means that trains leave on an entirely seperate track to their entry.

Another Ro-Ro station, far simpler this time around.

The extra stations are then built, two of them using the boring old X due to space restrictions caused by a lake at one station and the map edge at another. The third station, pictured above is a Ro-Ro station, though a smaller scale than the Steel Mill drop station. The track layout is starting to get a bit convoluted with tracks crossing over each other and so on, so a picture is included here. Finally, I also decide to add in another steel train as we now have 300 tonnes of Steel being produced in an average month.

And here we have the end result of connecting these extra mines.

At this stage, all the Iron Ore Mines have been connected up. For the next post, I will be focusing on another industry. As an aside, my existing passenger towns of Kipperwood and Sleepywig have reached sizes of 10k and 8.5k citizens respectively. Because of this, I replace our existing two passenger trains with 3 new trains using the Dash locomotive and 8 passenger carriages each.